From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, Republicans delay a vote on their tax bill after a report that the economics were off

by a trillion dollars. And the White House's elaborate plan to replace the secretary of state

with the head of the CIA and replace the head of the CIA with a sitting senator. It's Friday,

December 1st.

So Jim, throughout the day on Thursday, all the momentum seemed headed toward a vote on the

Republican tax bill. Then what happened? Well, the officials scored keepers of Congress,

the joint committee on taxation sort of dropped a bomb into the process. Jim Tancersley

covers taxes and the economy. They released a long-awaited economic analysis of the tax bill

that says, this is how much we think it's going to grow the economy. And this is how much

tax revenue we think it's going to produce. And then you subtract that from the cost of the overall

tax cuts. And you find, well, will this leave a big budget deficit at the end of 10 years?

And what the committee said was, yeah, it's going to raise deficits by about a trillion dollars

over 10 years, which is a big number, particularly for physical conservatives.

How much did Republicans anticipate that this bill might generate in terms of deficit?

So Republicans have been coy about this, but they have generally said that they think the bill

will pay for itself. And there are $1.4 trillion in tax cuts in the Senate bill, which would mean

zero extra deficits. So they were off by a trillion, roughly speaking. I mean, how could people

in Congress put together a bill of this scale be off by such an extraordinarily large amount of

money? $1 trillion. Well, they say it's the committee that's off. They say that the committee is

just not seeing what they see in terms of how much growth will be created by tax cuts.

Fundamentally, what this comes down to is Republicans just are really true believers in the

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